Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, affects about 1% of the population in the United States, interfering with the ability to enjoy life as disruptive thoughts and behaviors take control. If OCD is significantly impacting your life (or your child’s), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy may hold the key to releasing you from this potentially debilitating mental disorder.
As experts in TMS therapy, Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team here at the Institute for Advanced Psychiatry, have extensive experience in using this innovative approach to mental health. With TMS, we’ve helped scores of our patients take back control of their lives in the face of mental illness, including those who have OCD.
If you’re wondering whether TMS therapy can help with your OCD, read on.
If you have OCD, you likely understand all too well the effects that this condition can have on your life. While everyone worries or repeats behaviors from time to time, those who have OCD are stuck in a highly stressful cycle of thoughts and behaviors that can very much disrupt their daily lives.
When considering whether, and how, to treat the problem, the first step is to be honest with yourself about the impact that OCD has on your life. If you’re struggling with work, relationships, or school because of the overshadowing effect of your OCD, we want you to know that there are solutions, and TMS therapy is an extremely viable one.
While there’s much we still don’t understand when it comes to the exact mechanisms behind mental illness, ample evidence points toward problems in your brain’s neural networks. A neural network exists any time neurons work together, and these neurons communicate with one another through neurotransmitters.
Traditionally, mental health providers have focused on influencing the neurotransmitters, but, through TMS therapy, we address and alter your neural pathways directly.
At our practice, we use the BrainsWay® deep TMS system to deliver electromagnetic impulses to stimulate certain areas of your brain, including your:
The neural networks in these regions of your brain are largely responsible for many OCD symptoms, and by targeting them with electromagnetic impulses, our goal is to “rewire” your networks for healthier thoughts, moods, and behaviors.
While we’ve seen our own successes at our practice, outside studies have garnered the same results. Two studies in particular demonstrated that TMS therapy that targeted the presupplementary motor area led to a reduction in OCD symptoms, as well as a decrease in depression and anxiety. More encouraging is that the results held for most patients three months after their TMS sessions.
One of the many benefits of TMS therapy is that the treatments are completely noninvasive. Each session typically lasts between 20 and 40 minutes, and there’s no downtime afterward. Most patients benefit from a series of TMS treatments, and we can figure out what timeline would work best for you when you come in for an evaluation.
If you want to break the chains of OCD, contact our offices in Fort Worth or Granbury, Texas, to determine whether TMS therapy may be right for you.
